Roman Holiday 3: Blindsided: A Loveswept Contemporary Romance

by Ruthie Knox

  Roman Holiday 3: Blindsided is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A Loveswept eBook Original

  Copyright © 2013 by Ruth Homrighaus.

  Excerpt from Roman Holiday 4: Ravaged by Ruthie Knox copyright © 2013 by Ruthie Homrighaus

  All Rights Reserved.

  Published in the United States by Loveswept, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  LOVESWEPT is a registered trademark and the LOVESWEPT colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Roman Holiday 4: Ravaged by Ruthie Knox. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-345-54699-9

  www.ReadLoveSwept.com

  v3.1

  A Note from the Author

  Dear Readers,

  Is it just me, or have you caught yourself looking forward to Roman and the drum circle all week long? Because if there ever existed a man who deserved to be tortured with drum circles, it’s Roman. I get bouncy just thinking of it.

  But first, let’s recap last week’s chain of events.

  Fleeing a hurricane, Roman and Ashley drove from the Florida Keys to a commune on the edge of Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp. Along the way, Ashley sang Roman a song that made him want to gouge his own eyes out. They stopped for a meal, where she partook of corn, corn, corn, corn, and a biscuit while learning more about Roman’s plans for her grandmother’s rental apartments—plans she hated so much, they got into an argument. The Airstream’s door flapped open on the highway, leading to a very charged OMG-is-he-gonna-kiss-me moment in the Airstream but, sadly, no kiss. Then right as they arrived in the swamp, Roman jackknifed the trailer and mired his Caddy in the mud. One of Roman’s less intelligent moments, but then, it’s possible he just couldn’t tear himself away from Ashley.

  Either way, now they’re in Ashley-land, and the drum circle is warming up. What’s that you say? You’ll need a drink to get through this?

  Just be sure to keep your wits about you. I hear there are gators!

  xoxo,

  Ruthie

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  A Note from the Author

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Roman Holiday 4: Ravaged

  CHAPTER ONE

  Ashley leaned in, shimmying her shoulders to the rhythm as she pounded the drum.

  Across the circle, Kirk mirrored her movements, his bald head and smug smile as familiar to Ashley as were the pink cat sweatshirt Mitzi wore and the white streaks at the temples of her shiny black hair.

  Ashley knew every one of the faces that comprised this gathering of the Okefenokee Land Cooperative’s twice-monthly drum circle. She knew the texture of Mitzi’s sisal rug beneath her thighs, the pattern of the plaid couch, the collection of carved woodland creatures that crowded the shelves of Mitzi’s repurposed china cabinet.

  The familiarity of these people, this place, created lightness in her arms, peace and warmth in her chest.

  Her problems hadn’t gone anywhere, of course. Sunnyvale still rested on the chopping block, shivering in the shadow of the knife. Her grandmother was still dead, and Ashley was still grieving as best she knew how.

  But all that seemed to matter so much less now than it had earlier in the car with Roman. It had moved aside to make room for this movement, this heat, this light.

  Sweat gathered beneath her right breast and rolled down her stomach. Ashley paused to push up her sleeves. Kirk winked at her. She winked back.

  Leaning against the wall by the kitchen, Roman was silent. Watchful.

  He’d stayed out by the mud-mired Escalade for a long while after Ashley followed Mitzi inside. When she’d peeked out the kitchen window, she’d seen him as a silhouette against the taillights, leaning over the trailer hitch and trying to get a handle on his means of escape.

  He must not have found any, because eventually he’d come in—much to the delight of the assembled guests. There was nothing quite so exciting to the vegan residents of Okefenokee as fresh meat. Before Ashley joined the drumming, she’d heard him turn down offers of beet hummus, a pot brownie, and a sweat lodge visit. This last invitation had implied a three-way, though she wasn’t entirely sure Roman had caught that.

  Each time, his response was a perfectly polite, perfectly calm negative, delivered in a tone that suggested he’d been asked to lunch but had a previous engagement.

  He actually said those words, in response to the sweat-lodge three-way offer: I’m sorry, but I have a previous engagement. Eavesdropping from the kitchen, where she’d been helping Mitzi get the food ready, Ashley had laughed so hard she gave herself a stomach cramp.

  Each subsequent indignity made him stiffer, less responsive—this place, his stuck truck, the drum circle, the unrestrained conversation and unconventional offers. The way people kept introducing themselves by asking, So you’re with Ashley?

  Worst of all, the exposure to all this unabashed sharing of feelings, all this love. Roman’s worst nightmare.

  And oh, yes, that lifted her up, too. That put lightness in her heart, to be comforted and buoyed, certain that the morning would bring the solution she needed, while Roman was deliciously miserable.

  Nicole began a chant. Ashley repeated the words back, adding her voice to the chorus, admiring the gleam of Nicole’s waist-length red hair under the lights.

  Mitzi caught her eye and smiled conspiratorially. She’d promised to help, just as Ashley had known she would. Her eyes had lit up with the delight of it. Mitzi loved to scheme, loved even more to exact revenge.

  Hee-hee-ti-kago-oah!

  “Hee-hee-ti-kago-oah.”

  Kirk’s baritone carried the response line, and Ashley added a little flourish with her drum, an extra syncopated beat that gave her more lift.

  Free me, Key Largo!

  “Free me, Key Largo.”

  Ashley just sang whatever words came out. Whether they made sense or not was irrelevant. When you were drumming, you didn’t care about logic. The drum circle was all about freedom from shame. About physical, rhythmical, sexual, primitive rhythm—letting it move through you, releasing you from your burdens. Kirk had a whole spiel about chakra energy and drumming, how it activated the sacral chakra, which was the seat of sexual impulse.

  This explained why the drumming always made Ashley happy, hungry, and horny.

  Roman had his plastic-man thing going again. That look was starting to do strange things to her. She wanted to stand up and dance over and twine her arms around his neck and whisper phrases in his ear that would make the color rise up his neck and heat his cheeks. To invite him to do things to her that Carmen would never allow and Roman would never, ever permit himself to want.

  She wanted to see if she could make him want them, too.

  It wasn’t a real impulse, of course. It was just the drums talking.

  But the fantasy felt good. It pushed the rhythm down, down to the base of her. She closed her eyes, dreamy and hot and bothered and happy.

  When she opened them, he was watching her, and she smiled at him, j
ust because she could.

  Then she lowered her head and closed her eyes and pounded, pounded, pounded at the drum.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The headboard beat a relentless tattoo into the wall behind him.

  “Oh! Oh, oh, yeah, yeah baby, yeah, like that. Just like that. Just like—oh!”

  Roman sat up. Methodically, he began stripping the bedding off the futon.

  He’d tried covering his ears with his palms and his head with the pillow, but it didn’t help. Nothing helped. Mitzi and Kirk had been fucking since the dawn of time, and it was never going to end.

  Kirk was a god. He was a machine. For the first hour, Roman had been—if not envious, at least mildly impressed. It was an accomplishment of sorts, having such a vigorous sex life at Kirk’s age. Kitty-cat sweatshirt aside, Mitzi was an attractive woman.

  But God almighty, she made so much noise.

  Roman piled the bedding on top of his suitcase and folded the futon into the frame, returning it to a lumpy-couch shape. He folded the sheets, the blanket, and made a neat stack.

  Order restored—at least to this small corner of the living room. The rest of the place was still trashed from the party that had followed the drum circle. The party that had gone on for hours and hours, well into the night.

  He’d been trying to block out the mess, telling himself it wasn’t his living room, wasn’t his house, wasn’t even his state.

  No luck. Combined with the endless symphony of Kirk and Mitzi, the mess was more than he could take.

  He’d thought about going out to sleep in the truck, but it was too buggy and too humid to try that without turning on the AC, and he didn’t want to risk running down the battery or running out of gas in the middle of Swampland. Getting his tires stuck was bad enough. He could just imagine the rusted-out hulk that used to be his Cadillac. Feral swamp children gleefully stripping the tires and hood ornament.

  And even if he could have left, his foster father, Patrick, had trained him to be polite. All those childhood lessons made it next to impossible for Roman to leave without saying goodbye and thanking his hostess for her hospitality. He couldn’t thank his hostess without knocking on her bedroom door.

  Obviously, out of the question.

  In the kitchen, he found a garbage can under the sink. He returned to the living room and started picking up plates, stacking them into a pile and tossing all the food into the trash. He tried not to listen, but there was no way not to listen, and apparently no way to distract himself from making unwelcome comparisons.

  To Carmen, who had never made that much noise in bed with him. Not once. Not ever.

  To Ashley.

  Ashley, with her hair loose and her legs crossed on the floor, skin glowing with heat, shirt dark under her arms. Smiling at everyone, swaying back and forth as she beat on that stupid drum.

  Ashley, who’d pranced out of the bathroom and brushed her teeth while teasing him about all the invitations he’d received during the party. She’d been barely intelligible, her lips coated in blue foam, and he’d tried not to notice the way her pajama shorts hugged the curve of her ass, but failed.

  Rather spectacularly.

  She slept in the guest room, her bed separated from the futon in the living room by the width of a paneled wall.

  He picked up casserole dishes and coffee mugs with dried maroon blotches at the bottom. Half-empty beer bottles. A glass that held something that looked like water and smelled like apple pie laced with ethanol. Appetizer plates sprinkled with frosted brown crumbs.

  “Fuck me! God, yes, fuck me! Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, yeah yeah yeah yeah, baby, just like that, oh, I’m gonna come, I’m coming, I’m—”

  Roman turned on both taps at the sink, found the plug, and began filling the basin with warm water. He squirted in soap. He visualized his travel kit—a neat red-and-black nylon bag he’d purchased online because it had exactly the right number of pockets.

  One held a plastic vial filled with earplugs the color of flesh, another a set of earbuds in a small disc-shaped case, ready to be plugged into his phone.

  Two separate solutions to his problem.

  Too bad he’d forgotten the travel kit in the bathroom of the hotel back in Homestead.

  Ashley had showered before bed, and he’d been forced to share the guest bathroom with her shampoo smell. To wash his face with borrowed soap, and to skip brushing his teeth because he couldn’t bear the thought of using anyone else’s toothbrush or—Ashley’s repulsive solution—his finger.

  And now he had to listen to this, and he had to push the image of Ashley’s ass out of his head because if he didn’t, he found himself thinking about what it would look like framed between his palms. He found himself fixing on slick, glistening heat, slapping skin, moaning Ashley, and he couldn’t.

  He couldn’t.

  He wouldn’t.

  But he did. God, he did, over and over again until his stomach hurt and he thought he might be the single most vile person on the face of the earth.

  He had more willpower than this.

  With a flick of his hand, he pushed the faucet handle all the way to the left and stuck his hands under the water. Warm to hot to too hot, too much, and he watched the pale flesh at the base of his thumb and along his wrists redden in a flare of pain.

  He was loyal to Carmen, with her sweet face and her buttoned blouses and her endearing blunt ruthlessness.

  He was loyal to his own dignity, his principles, his self-control, and he had no interest in Ashley, but he knew what she’d be like. She’d be lewd. She’d be loud—outrageously loud—and he would hate it.

  He would hate every second of it, just like he hated being trapped in this house, this swamp, with these awful people.

  Mitzi stopped announcing her impending orgasm and started moaning, a sound beyond words that shamed him to hear. Shamed him to respond to that sound, to be pulling his hand from the water and pushing it, wet, against his disobedient cock through his cotton pajamas and his briefs. Willing this need to subside.

  But the action gave him only thick, burning pleasure and bottomless guilt, played out to the sound of Kirk groaning Fuck, fuck, babe in the next room.

  Roman couldn’t take it. With one hand, he untied his pajamas, shoved them and his briefs down and out of the way, took hot flesh in his searing hand for three slow strokes that made his eyes roll back into his head, made him go faster, a blurred fist and the other one wet, burning, the pain only making the pleasure ache better.

  He shouldn’t be doing this, so exposed, or at all. Not in the kitchen, because someone could come out. Someone might see, might know, and he had to go fast. Get it done before she caught him at it.

  A door in his mind swung open, unlocked only when his cock was in his hand and his control was gone, vanished.

  Behind it, his roommate at Princeton hunched on the couch with his girlfriend’s head between his legs, bobbing and glistening, his slack mouth wet and open.

  Carmen, fifteen, dressed for the beach and completely off-limits—the bounce of her tits and the mystery of her pussy and the forbidden smell between her legs.

  Roman’s first time, at a party, on a pile of coats with a girl they called a skank whose face reminded him of Samantha, and who let him fuck her without a condom even though it had been stupid, stupid—

  Scenes from a dozen porn movies, paragraphs stolen from books, anger, power, slavery, abuse, captivity, all of it bad, so bad, but none of it sparked and his hand hurt, he ached, he thought for a second this might not even work—and then another door opened inside his head, and there was Ashley.

  Ashley’s white ass tipped up, his cock deep inside her, her spine a runway for his fingers to travel to the back of her neck and hold her down, keep her put.

  Ashley with her wrists chained behind her back and no T-shirt, just that blue bikini and mulch stuck to her legs, her burned cheek flaming pink and his cock halfway down her throat.

  Ashley and her armpits, her armpit hai
r, her wrists pinioned above her head on the bed and her mouth, smiling, her breasts flattening against his chest as he kissed her and he fucked her and she wrapped her legs around him and pulled him in, into this heat hot wet guilt, unable to believe he’d even done it. This terrible thing. This betrayal.

  Unable to believe it, unable to stop, unable to regret it or prevent his hand from stroking, stroking, weakening his knees and sending tremors through his arm braced on the countertop, forcing his wet mouth open in a soundless shout that hurt deep in his chest.

  The house fell quiet, the silence like a death.

  You’re sick.

  Never want to see you again.

  Something wrong with you.

  Always, always something wrong with him. Something broken that he could never fix.

  But it was done now. He’d done it, and he couldn’t undo it. He could only draw a line under it and refuse to repeat it.

  Roman tucked himself away and washed his hands.

  The sun had begun to come up, lighting a glow out over the swamp.

  He washed all the dishes twice, dried them, and put them away.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Ashley found Roman at the breakfast table.

  Morning light came in at an angle through the glass patio doors and made his black hair gleam white, as though he had no color to him at all. Beneath the table, the bunched shapes of his calves were visible through his gray-and-white striped pajama pants.

  Old-man pajamas. She bet he had the matching top in his suitcase—collared, with long sleeves and buttons. She bet he wore it, normally, but hadn’t been able to bring himself to put it on in Mitzi’s House of Carnal Hippie Sin.

  The T-shirt he’d put on instead was green and surprisingly soft-looking. So was the curve of his neck as he bent his head over his cell phone. It unsettled her how much she wanted to walk up behind him and run one finger along the visible bumps of his vertebrae. Lean close to smell his warm skin.

  Damn. Maybe her dirty thoughts last night hadn’t been entirely drumming-related.